As a new discovery with implications in the fields of radiology and optical computing, anti-laser technology was recently discovered and demonstrated by scientists at Yale University. Here’s how it works:

When two laser beams were shone into a cavity containing that wafer, it aligned the light waves so that they became “perfectly trapped,” causing them to ricochet back and forth until they were absorbed and transformed into heat.

Its official name is coherent perfect absorber (CPA) pointing to its ability to absorb 99.4% of incoming light, a percentage that is set to increase according to A. Douglas Stone, whom leads the research group at Yale. As far as its applications, Disinformation claimed that it “may be useful for designing light-based devices integrated into electronic computer chips”. More impressively, Douglas Stone was quoted to have said that it brings us closer to making time travel a reality.

In the context of lasers, time reversal isn’t a way for scientists to travel back to childhood and fix their embarrassing mistakes. It’s a technique for rewinding and undoing a process by reversing the mathematics underlying it — in this case, by changing a plus sign to a minus sign to make the energy absorbed by the antilaser equal to the energy produced by a laser”